DL Open Thread Sunday, March 28, 2021

Ready for some boycottin’? Sure, Coca-Cola, but now comes word that Inspire Brands — a private-capital band of crookscompany that owns Jimmy Johns, Arby’s, Sonic, and Buffalo Wild Wings, as well as Dunkin’ Donuts, which it acquired for $11.3 billion in November, is bragging that it killed the $15 minimum wage. I’d like to boycott these places, but I already avoid them, so help a brother out.

Democracy Corps held a series of focus group meetings with Trump supporters in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin. What they found isn’t particularly surprising: “The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.” Yet even Trump’s base is curious about how they might benefit from the American Rescue Plan, as opposed to Obamacare, which they viewed as a new entitlement for Blacks and immigrants that must be stopped. Also: They were angered most of all by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa that were responsible for a full year of violence in Democratic cities that put white people on the defensive – and was ignored by the media, and they see Biden, as a white man, as not threatening, unlike Obama who represented everything Tea Party-Republicans were determined to fight. Tl;dr — they’re stone-cold racists whether they know it or not.

Republicans are also incredibly, grossly stupid, as evidenced by Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who in two different speeches lamented that the meth in Montana is no longer homemade but is being imported from Mexico. He was trying to warn that they new stuff is stronger, but lacking the intelligence to just say that, he came up with this formulation instead.

Wealthy Americans shielded 20% of their income from taxes, bilking the government out of at least $175 billion a year.

Amazon’s anti-union fight has reached the Outright Lying stage, as the company denied that its drivers have to pee in bottles because of the company’s draconian quotas. Thousands of employees know it’s a lie, and gave The Intercept the company memos to prove it.

Most people understand that West Virginia’s Joe Manchin was elected in a scarlet state so he often acts like a Republican. As this Jacobin story demonstrates, Kyrsten Sinema, who started political life as a Green on her way to full neo-liberalsism, has no such excuse. A good look at how power corrupts.

The Philadelphia Inquirer published a devastating story on the state’s horse racing industry, which has been the beneficiary of roughly $3 billion in subsidies with no end in sight and is getting horses killed at increased rates. Gov. Tom Wolf has targeted some of that enormous pot of money for education; we’ll see how that flies in Pennsyltucky.

On the Good News front, the Louvre — you know, the one in Paris — has reacted to the pandemic by finally putting its entire collection online. This is a rabbit hole worth descending.

The floor’s yours.